SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Satellite alerts track deforestation in real time
(2016)

A satellite-based alert system could prove a potent weapon in the fight against deforestation. As few as eight hours after it detects that trees are being cut down, the system will send out e-mails warning that an area is endangered. That rapid response could enable environmental managers to catch illegal loggers before they damage large swathes of forest. " It's going to be very, very helpful, " says Brian Zutta Salazar, a remote-sensing scientist at the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment in Lima. Satellites are already valuable tools for monitoring deforestation; in recent decades, they have delivered consistent data on forest change over large and often remote areas. One such effort, the Real Time System for Detection of Deforestation, or DETER, has helped Brazil's government to reduce its deforestation rate by almost 80% since 2004, by alerting the country's environmental police to large-scale forest clearing. But DETER and other existing alert systems can be relatively slow to yield useful information. They use data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, which at its top resolution produces images with pixels covering an area 250 metres on each side, roughly equivalent to 10 football pitches. This is too big to spot small changes in land cover, so it can take computer programs that process MODIS data weeks or even months to detect that a forest is being cleared. " By the time MODIS picks up on it, it's almost too late, " says Peter Ellis, a forest-carbon scientist at the Nature Conservancy, a conservation group in Arlington, Virginia. Seeking to provide a sharper view, geographer Matthew Hansen of the University of Maryland in College Park and his colleagues published maps showing year-to-year changes in global forest cover from 2000 to 2012 (M. C. Hansen et al. Science 342, 850–853; 2013). The researchers relied on data from NASA's two active Landsat satellites, which together photograph every spot on Earth every eight days. Each pixel in a Landsat image is 30 metres on each side — roughly the size of a baseball diamond. This means that an area covered by just one MODIS pixel is captured in roughly 70 smaller Landsat pixels. Hansen and his team wrote data-processing software that can use these higher-resolution images to recognize a disturbance as small as a road snaking its way through a previously untouched forest, something that often appears before clear-cutting begins. " …
OpenSense: open community driven sensing of environment
(2010)

This paper outlines a vision for community-driven sensing of our environment. At its core, community sensing is a dynamic new form of mobile geosensor network. We believe that community sensing networks, in order to be widely deployable and sustainable, need to follow utilitarian approaches towards sensing and data management. Current projects exploring community sensing have paid less attention to these underlying fundamental principles. We illustrate this vision through OpenSense -- a large project that aims to explore community sensing driven by air pollution monitoring.
Automated Essay Scoring 1 Automated Essay Scoring: Writing Assessment and Instruction
(2009)

Automated Essay Scoring 2 Introduction This chapter documents the advent and rise of automated essay scoring (AES) as a means of both assessment and instruction. The first section discusses what AES is, how it works, and who the major purveyors of the technology are. The second section describes outgrowths of the technology as it applies to ongoing projects in measurement and education. In 1973, the late Ellis Page and colleagues at the University of Connecticut programmed the first successful automated essay scoring engine, " Project Essay Grade (PEG) " (1973). The technology was foretold some six years earlier in a landmark Phi Delta Kappan article entitled, " The Imminence of Grading Essays by Computer " (Page, 1966). At the time the article was provocative and a bit outrageous, though in hindsight, it can only be deemed prophetic. As a former high school English teacher , Page was convinced that students would benefit greatly by having access to technology that would provide quick feedback on their writing. He also realized that the greatest hindrance to having secondary students write more was the requirement that, ultimately, a teacher had to review stacks of papers. While PEG produced impressive results, the technology of the time was too primitive to make it a practical application. Text had to be typed on IBM 80-column punched cards and read into a mainframe computer before it could be evaluated. As a consequence, the technology sat dormant until the early 1990s and was revitalized with the confluence of two technological developments: microcomputers and the Internet. Microcomputers permitted the generation of electronic text from a regular keyboard and the internet provided a universal platform to submit text for review Automated Essay Scoring 3 Automated essay scoring is a measurement technology in which computers evaluate written work (Shermis & Burstein, 2003). Most of the initial applications have 2002). Computers do not " understand " the written text being evaluated. So, for example, the computer would not " get " the following joke. Q-When is a door not a door? A-When it is ajar. Unlike humans, a computer cannot interpret the play on words, and infer that the predicate in the answer (i.e., " ajar ") is being cleverly used as a noun (i.e., " a jar "). What the computer does in an AES context is to analyze the written text into its observable components. Different AES systems evaluate different …
A micro-video recommendation system based on big data
(2016)

With the development of the Internet and social networking service, the micro-video is becoming more popular, especially for youngers. However, for many users, they spend a lot of time to get their favorite micro-videos from amounts videos on the Internet; for the micro-video producers, they do not know what kinds of viewers like their products. Therefore, this paper proposes a micro-video recommendation system. The recommendation algorithms are the core of this system. Traditional recommendation algorithms include content-based recommendation, collaboration recommendation algorithms, and so on. At the Bid Data times, the challenges what we meet are data scale, performance of computing, and other aspects. Thus, this paper improves the traditional recommendation algorithms, using the popular parallel computing framework to process the Big Data. Slope one recommendation algorithm is a parallel computing algorithm based on MapReduce and Hadoop framework which is a high performance parallel computing platform. The other aspect of this system is data visualization. Only an intuitive, accurate visualization interface, the viewers and producers can find what they need through the micro-video recommendation system.
SUIT: A Supervised User-Item Based Topic Model for Sentiment Analysis
(2014)

Probabilistic topic models have been widely used for sentiment analysis. However, most of existing topic methods only model the sentiment text, but do not consider the user, who expresses the sentiment, and the item, which the sentiment is expressed on. Since different users may use different sentiment expressions for different items, we argue that it is better to incorporate the user and item information into the topic model for sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a new Supervised User-Item based Topic model, called SUIT model, for sentiment analysis. It can simultaneously utilize the textual topic and latent user-item factors. Our proposed method uses the tensor outer product of text topic proportion vector, user latent factor and item latent factor to model the sentiment label generalization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two datasets: review dataset and microblog dataset. The results demonstrate the advantages of our model. It shows significant improvement compared with supervised topic models and collaborative filtering methods.
Developing learner corpus annotation for Chinese grammatical errors
(2016)

This study describes the construction of the TOCFL (Test Of Chinese as a Foreign Language) learner corpus, including the collection and grammatical error annotation of 2,837 essays written by Chinese language learners originating from a total of 46 different mother-tongue languages. We propose hierarchical tagging sets to manually annotate grammatical errors, resulting in 33,835 inappropriate usages. Our built corpus has been provided for the shared tasks on Chinese grammatical error diagnosis. These demonstrate the usability of our learner corpus annotation.
Information, Utility & Bounded Rationality
(2011)

Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we employ an axiomatic framework for bounded rational decision-making based on a thermodynamic interpretation of resource costs as information costs. This leads to a variational “free utility” principle akin to thermodynamical free energy that trades off utility and information costs. We show that bounded optimal control solutions can be derived from this variational principle, which leads in general to stochastic policies. Furthermore, we show that risk-sensitive and robust (minimax) control schemes fall out naturally from this framework if the environment is considered as a bounded rational and perfectly rational opponent, respectively. When resource costs are ignored, the maximum expected utility principle is recovered.
Resilient 3D hierarchical architected metamaterials.
(2015)

Hierarchically designed structures with architectural features that span across multiple length scales are found in numerous hard biomaterials, like bone, wood, and glass sponge skeletons, as well as manmade structures, like the Eiffel Tower. It has been hypothesized that their mechanical robustness and damage tolerance stem from sophisticated ordering within the constituents, but the specific role of hierarchy remains to be fully described and understood. We apply the principles of hierarchical design to create structural metamaterials from three material systems: (i) polymer, (ii) hollow ceramic, and (iii) ceramic-polymer composites that are patterned into self-similar unit cells in a fractal-like geometry. In situ nanomechanical experiments revealed (i) a nearly theoretical scaling of structural strength and stiffness with relative density, which outperforms existing nonhierarchical nanolattices; (ii) recoverability, with hollow alumina samples recovering up to 98% of their original height after compression to ≥ 50% strain; (iii) suppression of brittle failure and structural instabilities in hollow ceramic hierarchical nanolattices; and (iv) a range of deformation mechanisms that can be tuned by changing the slenderness ratios of the beams. Additional levels of hierarchy beyond a second order did not increase the strength or stiffness, which suggests the existence of an optimal degree of hierarchy to amplify resilience. We developed a computational model that captures local stress distributions within the nanolattices under compression and explains some of the underlying deformation mechanisms as well as validates the measured effective stiffness to be interpreted as a metamaterial property.
Common mode noise cancellation for electrically non-contact ECG measurement system on a chair.
(2005)

Electrically non-contact ECG measurement system on a chair can be applied to a number of various fields for continuous health monitoring in daily life. However, the body is floated electrically for this system due to the capacitive electrodes and the floated body is very sensitive to the external noises or motion artifacts which affect the measurement system as the common mode noise. In this paper, the Driven-Seat-Ground circuit similar to the Driven-Right-Leg circuit is proposed to reduce the common mode noise. The analysis of this equivalent circuit is performed and the output signal waveforms are compared between with Driven-Seat-Ground and with capacitive ground. As the results, the Driven-Seat-Ground circuit improves significantly the properties of the fully capacitive ECG measurement system as the negative feedback.
Minimum Steiner Tree Construction
(2008)

In optimizing the area of Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) layouts, circuit interconnections should generally be realized with minimum total interconnect. This chapter addresses several variations of the corresponding fundamental Steiner minimal tree (SMT) problem, where a given set of pins is to be connected using minimum total wirelength. Steiner trees are important in global routing and wirelength estimation [15], as well as in various non-VLSI applications such as phylogenetic tree reconstruction in biology [48], network routing [61], and civil engineering, among many other areas [21, 25, 26, 29, 51, 74].
Dynamic path planning and replanning for mobile robots using RRT
(2017)

It is necessary for a mobile robot to be able to efficiently plan a path from its starting, or current location to a desired goal location. This is a trivial task when the environment is static. However, the operational environment of the robot is rarely static, and it often has many moving obstacles. The robot may encounter one, or many of these unknown and unpredictable moving obstacles. The robot will need to decide how to proceed when one of these obstacles is obstructing it's path. A method of dynamic replanning using RRT∗ is presented. The robot will modify it's current plan when an unknown random moving obstacle obstructs the path. Various experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Impacts of IoT and big data to automotive industry
(2015)

With the recent advancement in technologies such as embedded system, wireless distributed sensor, light weight material, smart cognitive radio networks, cloud computing, higher efficiency and ultra-low emission internal combustion engines, intelligent converter, high performance battery and fuel cell technology, the production of smarter, safer, energy efficient and zero emission vehicles is possible in near future. Apart from vehicle technologies, other factors such as road users', well maintained road infrastructure, well maintained vehicles, drivers' attitudes and law and enforcement are also important to be considered and they should work together in order to make our world natural resources can be preserved and maintain cleaner environment and produce sustainable mobility. This paper will discuss the impacts of IoT and Big Data and other emerging technologies mentioned above to the automotive industry. It will include discussion on education, economy, advanced technology, environment, safety and energy.
Efficient GPU Screen-Space Ray Tracing
(2014)

We present an efficient GPU solution for screen-space 3D ray tracing against a depth buffer by adapting the perspective-correct DDA line rasterization algorithm. Compared to linear ray marching, this ensures sampling at a contiguous set of pixels and no oversampling. This paper provides for the first time full implementation details of a method that has been proven in production of recent major game titles. After explaining the optimizations, we then extend the method to support multiple depth layers for robustness. We include GLSL code and examples of pixel-shader ray tracing for several applications.
Compressive phase retrieval via generalized approximate message passing
(2012)

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to compressive phase retrieval based on loopy belief propagation and, in particular, on the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed PR-GAMP algorithm has excellent phase-transition behavior, noise robustness, and runtime. In particular, for successful recovery of synthetic Bernoulli-circular-Gaussian signals, PR-GAMP requires ≈4 times the number of measurements as a phase-oracle version of GAMP and, at moderate to large SNR, the NMSE of PR-GAMP is only ≈3 dB worse than that of phase-oracle GAMP. A comparison to the recently proposed convex-relation approach known as “CPRL” reveals PR-GAMP's superior phase transition and orders-of-magnitude faster runtimes, especially as the problem dimensions increase. When applied to the recovery of a 65k-pixel grayscale image from 32k randomly masked magnitude measurements, numerical results show a median PR-GAMP runtime of only 13.4 seconds.
A Rule-Based System to Extract Financial Information
(2012)

Extracting up-to-date information from financial documents can be important in making investment decisions. However, the unstructured nature and enormity of the volume of such data makes manual analysis tedious and time consuming. Information extraction technology can be applied to automatically extract the most relevant and precise financial information. This paper introduces a rule-based information extraction methodology for the extraction of highly accurate financial information to aid investment decisions. The methodology includes a rule-based symbolic learning model trained by the Greedy Search algorithm and a similar model trained by the Tabu Search algorithm. The methodology has been found very effective in extracting financial information from NASDAQ-listed companies. Also, the Tabu Search based model performed better than some well-known systems. The simple rule structure makes the system portable and it should make parallel processing implementations easier.
Metropolis procedural modeling
(2011)

Procedural representations provide powerful means for generating complex geometric structures. They are also notoriously difficult to control. In this article, we present an algorithm for controlling grammar-based procedural models. Given a grammar and a high-level specification of the desired production, the algorithm computes a production from the grammar that conforms to the specification. This production is generated by optimizing over the space of possible productions from the grammar. The algorithm supports specifications of many forms, including geometric shapes and analytical objectives. We demonstrate the algorithm on procedural models of trees, cities, buildings, and Mondrian paintings.
Markov logic networks
(2006)

We propose a simple approach to combining first-order logic and probabilistic graphical models in a single representation. A Markov logic network (MLN) is a first-order knowledge base with a weight attached to each formula (or clause). Together with a set of constants representing objects in the domain, it specifies a ground Markov network containing one feature for each possible grounding of a first-order formula in the KB, with the corresponding weight. Inference in MLNs is performed by MCMC over the minimal subset of the ground network required for answering the query. Weights are efficiently learned from relational databases by iteratively optimizing a pseudo-likelihood measure. Optionally, additional clauses are learned using inductive logic programming techniques. Experiments with a real-world database and knowledge base in a university domain illustrate the promise of this approach.
Delayed Rejection in Reversible
(1999)

In a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, rejection of proposed moves is an intrinsic part of ensuring that the chain converges to the intended target distribution. However, persistent rejection, perhaps in particular parts of the state space, may indicate that locally the proposal distribution is badly calibrated to the target. As an alternative to careful oo-line tuning of state-dependent proposals, the basic algorithm can be modiied so that on rejection, a second attempt to move is made. A diierent proposal can be generated from a new distribution, that is allowed to depend on the previously rejected proposal. We generalise this idea of delaying the rejection and adapting the proposal distribution, due to Tierney and Mira (1999), to generate a more exible class of methods, that in particular applies to a variable dimension setting. The approach is illustrated by two pedagogical examples, and a more realistic application, to a change-point analysis for point processes.
Adwords management for third-parties in SEM: An optimisation model and the potential of Twitter
(2016)

In Search Engine Marketing (SEM), “third-party” partners play an important intermediate role by bridging the gap between search engines and advertisers in order to optimise advertisers' campaigns in exchange of a service fee. In this paper, we present an economic analysis of the market involving a third-party broker in Google AdWords and the broker's customers. We show that in order to optimise his profit, a third-party broker should minimise the weighted average Cost Per Click (CPC) of the portfolio of keywords attached to customer's ads while still satisfying the negotiated customer's demand. To help the broker build and manage such portfolio of keywords, we develop an optimisation framework inspired from the classical Markowitz portfolio management which integrates the customer's demand constraint and enables the broker to manage the tradeoff between return on investment and risk through a single risk aversion parameter. We then propose a method to augment the keywords portfolio with relevant keywords extracted from trending and popular topics on Twitter. Our evaluation shows that such a keywords-augmented strategy is very promising and enables the broker to achieve, on average, four folds larger return on investment than with a non-augmented strategy, while still maintaining the same level of risk.
Support vector machines under adversarial label contamination
(2015)

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly being applied in security-related tasks such as spam and malware detection, although their security properties against deliberate attacks have not yet been widely understood. Intelligent and adaptive attackers may indeed exploit specific vulnerabilities exposed by machine learning techniques to violate system security. Being robust to adversarial data manipulation is thus an important, additional requirement for machine learning algorithms to successfully operate in adversarial settings. In this work, we evaluate the security of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to well-crafted, adversarial label noise attacks. In particular, we consider an attacker that aims to maximize the SVM’s classification error by flipping a number of labels in the training data. We formalize a corresponding optimal attack strategy, and solve it by means of heuristic approaches to keep the computational complexity tractable. We report an extensive experimental analysis on the effectiveness of the considered attacks against linear and non-linear SVMs, both on synthetic and real-world datasets. We finally argue that our approach can also provide useful insights for developing more secure SVM learning algorithms, and also novel techniques in a number of related research areas, such as semi-supervised and active learning.
Holographic Embeddings of Knowledge Graphs
(2016)

Learning embeddings of entities and relations is an efficient and versatile method to perform machine learning on relational data such as knowledge graphs. In this work, we propose holographic embeddings (HOLE) to learn compositional vector space representations of entire knowledge graphs. The proposed method is related to holographic models of associative memory in that it employs circular correlation to create compositional representations. By using correlation as the compositional operator, H OLE can capture rich interactions but simultaneously remains efficient to compute, easy to train, and scalable to very large datasets. Experimentally, we show that holographic embeddings are able to outperform state-ofthe-art methods for link prediction on knowledge graphs and relational learning benchmark datasets.